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Past Masters (Oxford)
Malthus: A Very Short Introduction
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an English cleric whose ideas, as expounded in his most famous work the Essay on the Principle of Population, caused a storm of controversy. In this Very Short Introduction, Donald Winch explains and clarifies Malthus's ideas, assessing the profound influence he has had on modern economic thought.Concentrating on his writings, Winch sheds light on the context in which he wrote and why his work has remained controversial. Looking at Malthus's early life as well as the evolution of his theories from population to political economy, Winch considers why and how Malthus's writings have been so influential in the thought of later figures such as Darwin and Keynes.ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
152 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 10, 1987
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235 people want to read
About the author
Donald Winch
23 books2 followersEmeritus Professor of Intellectual History and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.
Born 1935 in London. A beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, he attended a local grammar school and was awarded a state scholarship to study at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a degree in economics in 1956. His initial specialisation was in the economics of international trade, and a scholarship enabled him to study at Princeton, where Jacob Viner was the leading expert. Viner was also a notable historian of economics, and Winch chose to write a doctoral dissertation on the economics of empire and colonization, later published as Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965).
Winch.s first academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to this country when offered a lectureship in the department of political economy in Edinburgh. Three years later, in 1963, he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he has remained for nearly half a century, broken by visiting appointments in Cambridge, Oxford, North America and Japan. For most of that time Winch was attached to the School of Social Sciences, becoming its Dean for 6 years in 1968. His main undergraduate teaching centred on one of the School.s compulsory contextual courses, Concepts, Methods, and Values (CMV). This enabled him to extend his interest in the methodology and history of economics into a broader concern with the history of the social sciences from the Enlightenment onwards. He continued to teach economics well into the 1980s, though by then most of his teaching, and all of his research, was in intellectual history.
Born 1935 in London. A beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, he attended a local grammar school and was awarded a state scholarship to study at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a degree in economics in 1956. His initial specialisation was in the economics of international trade, and a scholarship enabled him to study at Princeton, where Jacob Viner was the leading expert. Viner was also a notable historian of economics, and Winch chose to write a doctoral dissertation on the economics of empire and colonization, later published as Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965).
Winch.s first academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to this country when offered a lectureship in the department of political economy in Edinburgh. Three years later, in 1963, he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he has remained for nearly half a century, broken by visiting appointments in Cambridge, Oxford, North America and Japan. For most of that time Winch was attached to the School of Social Sciences, becoming its Dean for 6 years in 1968. His main undergraduate teaching centred on one of the School.s compulsory contextual courses, Concepts, Methods, and Values (CMV). This enabled him to extend his interest in the methodology and history of economics into a broader concern with the history of the social sciences from the Enlightenment onwards. He continued to teach economics well into the 1980s, though by then most of his teaching, and all of his research, was in intellectual history.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 1, 2023
Much economic analysis from Malthus' era no longer applies. Agriculture has plummeted as a share of England's GDP. Services have boomed. The financial sector plays a much larger role. Globalisation. But Malthus deals (more than other economists of his era) with the seemingly timeless issues of population pressures, scarcity of resources, instability, and stagnating growth.
Malthus' concern with the interaction between the economy and the provision of food is very similar to the current debate over the economy versus the environment and climate change (which affect food production).
Interesting method of combining moral analysis with economic science. There are issues with moving from is to ought but if we use economics as a tool to create the most value then we must give thought to what we should consider valuable.
Malthus' concern with the interaction between the economy and the provision of food is very similar to the current debate over the economy versus the environment and climate change (which affect food production).
Interesting method of combining moral analysis with economic science. There are issues with moving from is to ought but if we use economics as a tool to create the most value then we must give thought to what we should consider valuable.
November 16, 2020
A concise intro on what Malthus considered the effects of overpopulation. The somewhat ironic thing is how such a theory keeps being proved wrong time and again, and at the same time elicits fear that it may be right. Best intro on Malthus I've read so far, as Heilbroner and the rest of those who tried to pin down the subject were doing a mistake in overgeneralizing this economist.
November 26, 2015
Robert Malthus is famous for making mistakes. He is reputed for claiming that the world could not possibly sustain a population of more than a billion, and that drastic action should therefore be taken to reduce population growth. Few thinkers of the Enlightenment period have attracted more opprobrium. And yet his legacy most certainly lives with us.
He lived in a period when the subject discipline we know as economics was in its infancy. Indeed he, along with Adam Smith, can be considered one of its founding fathers. But the thing about founding a discipline is that much of what you say will be exposed as mistaken by your successors (by analogy: Aristotle and Physics), but that does not diminish the extent of your achievement in laying the foundation. The extent of imagination required is far beyond the capabilities of most. Malthus is perhaps most to be thanked for deploying his mathematical education in it, both statistics and calculus. Though some of this application was awry, and it would take the appearance of computers to actually make some sense of the figures, the idea was there because of him.
The idea he is most associated with is that the 'hare' of population growth must regularly outstrip the 'tortoise' of food production, leading to a great deal of misery and vice. One hears the same ideas echoed by modern-day environmentalists today, although they seldom couch in the moralistic terms of the eighteenth-century clergyman. As it happens, his predictions were wildly mistaken. One feels the need to point this out to his latter-day disciples: in all likelihood, the present enormous population growth in the developing world will flatten out as they grow into more comfortable and middle class lives, while technology advances to the stage where the planet is able to cope with a stabilised population. That may seem rather optimistic, but no-one can really tell.
Donald Winch's fine introduction is to the life, work and thought of the man himself, with only a short conclusion about his legacy and relevance to the world of today. Malthus is sometimes portrayed as a pessimist and regressive in a world of forward-thinking Enlightenment optimists, but Professor Winch shows that this is quite the opposite of the truth. He frames Malthus' thought in terms of the his Whiggish tendencies in the politics of his era and the liberal Anglican world in which he lived. It is often quite difficult going, so the reader is recommended to have her wits about her, but that is certainly not the author's fault; it would be idle indeed to expect tricky subject matter to be simple to understand. Indeed, modern-day readers with no experience of old books often naively assume that all older ideas are simpler than modern ones, as if people were less intelligent once, but Malthus is ample demonstration of the fallaciousness of this assumption. Approach with caution.
He lived in a period when the subject discipline we know as economics was in its infancy. Indeed he, along with Adam Smith, can be considered one of its founding fathers. But the thing about founding a discipline is that much of what you say will be exposed as mistaken by your successors (by analogy: Aristotle and Physics), but that does not diminish the extent of your achievement in laying the foundation. The extent of imagination required is far beyond the capabilities of most. Malthus is perhaps most to be thanked for deploying his mathematical education in it, both statistics and calculus. Though some of this application was awry, and it would take the appearance of computers to actually make some sense of the figures, the idea was there because of him.
The idea he is most associated with is that the 'hare' of population growth must regularly outstrip the 'tortoise' of food production, leading to a great deal of misery and vice. One hears the same ideas echoed by modern-day environmentalists today, although they seldom couch in the moralistic terms of the eighteenth-century clergyman. As it happens, his predictions were wildly mistaken. One feels the need to point this out to his latter-day disciples: in all likelihood, the present enormous population growth in the developing world will flatten out as they grow into more comfortable and middle class lives, while technology advances to the stage where the planet is able to cope with a stabilised population. That may seem rather optimistic, but no-one can really tell.
Donald Winch's fine introduction is to the life, work and thought of the man himself, with only a short conclusion about his legacy and relevance to the world of today. Malthus is sometimes portrayed as a pessimist and regressive in a world of forward-thinking Enlightenment optimists, but Professor Winch shows that this is quite the opposite of the truth. He frames Malthus' thought in terms of the his Whiggish tendencies in the politics of his era and the liberal Anglican world in which he lived. It is often quite difficult going, so the reader is recommended to have her wits about her, but that is certainly not the author's fault; it would be idle indeed to expect tricky subject matter to be simple to understand. Indeed, modern-day readers with no experience of old books often naively assume that all older ideas are simpler than modern ones, as if people were less intelligent once, but Malthus is ample demonstration of the fallaciousness of this assumption. Approach with caution.
November 22, 2014
A very decent short introduction to an author that few people feel the need to engage with. And frankly, I can see why. Many of Malthus's predictions were proven wrong already during his lifetime. But the other reason for Malthus's bad reputation - the harshness of his moral stance, his conservative approach to reforms, and his deep pessimism about the improvement of the human condition - are less obviously wrong. So, if you want to know what's good and bad about Malthusian doctrines, this short book is not a bad place to start the inquiry.
September 1, 2023
A good introduction.
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May 3, 2018With the Avengers Infinity War release, Malthusian ideas on the 'crisis' of overpopulation are re-entering the cultural landscape and it is a good a time as any to explore the logical basis for Malthusianism and its validity. This short book is an aid to this, though it is more of a historical biography that devotes a chapter to each major publication of Malthus, and he had several interests, of which demography was only one. Nevertheless, there were some summaries here that were helpful for my original purpose. The core idea of Malthusianism that the popular media (in the form of the Avengers storyline, the Dan Brown storyline, etc) transmit is that overpopulation leads to a resource scarcity problem, and extreme measures, ranging from neglect of the poor(Malthus) to genocide(Avengers, Dan Brown) are necessary to solve it. However this book reveals that Malthus arrives at that conclusion only from two wrong premises: a)a human population that has enough consumption will keep reproducing, and b)population increase is geometric while food increase is arithmetic. Both are wrong and even Malthus admitted this in his lifetime, and the book takes pains to show how his pessimistic outlooks were specially created by conditions in Britain at that specific point in time, as they transformed from an agrarian to an industrial country. His ideas shouldn't have as much heft today, yet here we are.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews